Sean Penn Explains His Sweet, Strange Wish for Julia Roberts

If last month’s Toronto Film Festival signaled the start of awards season, last night’s Hollywood Film Awards signaled the kick-off of Hollywood’s four-month-plus trophy procession. At the Beverly Hills event, many of next year’s Oscar contenders stopped by to dust off their podium routine by accepting the first accolades of the season. Among them: Matthew McConaughey, who accepted the Hollywood actor award for Dallas Buyers Club; Sandra Bullock, who accepted the Hollywood actress award for Gravity; and Julia Roberts, who either accepted the supporting-actress award for August: Osage County or, judging by Sean Penn’s bizarre seven-minute-long introduction, a lifetime-achievement award for on-screen eating. Highlights of the speech, per People:

[M]ost likely referring toEat Pray Love, [Penn said,] “[She] is one of the select group of actresses who can make on-screen eating sexy . . . I could watch her eat . . . for hours on end, even if the food got stuck in her teeth. I want her to make an eating movie in 3-D, but the interactive supplies not only the 3-D glasses, but also a virtual toothpick with which I could collect souvenirs correcting my insomnia with the comfort of those virtual morsels kept carefully beneath my pillow.”

As guests laughed—and scratched their heads—he continued, “How great would it be to sit there watching a Julia Roberts movie [as] she’s eating corn on the cob and then something gets stuck and you can take your virtual toothpick and say, ‘I got that bit?’”

After Penn introduced Roberts/pitched Hollywood on a Julia-Roberts-eating-in-3-D blockbuster that might be able to correct his nagging sleeping disorder, Roberts accepted the award by graciously acknowledging her own food-consumption craft. “Fortunately, I am a hearty eater,” Peoplequotes Roberts as saying during her acceptance speech, “which I told my husband 13 years ago when he asked me out on a date. ‘Prepare yourself. I won't just have a salad.’ But that’s worked out for us.”

So far, Roberts and Penn have a stronghold on the most endearingly W.T.F. awards exchange of the 2013–2014 season. Your move, Tom Hanks and Robert Redford.